Welcome to Carve December 2017! This is the first year I'm participating in so I'm really excited. I would label myself as a beginner as far as carving goes. I gave it a try many years ago when a friend got me a carving blade and a piece of the pink Speedball rubber. Let's just say it was less than successful and I haven't attempted it since.
Recently Marcie at Imagine posted a link to this challenge and I thought it sounded like lots of fun so I am going to give it a shot. I can't promise that I'll carve every day but I'm going to play as much as possible time wise.
I wanted to start out easy so I went with a geometric design. This is a stamp I've wanted for several years, I just haven't gotten around to purchasing one so I decided to make one for myself!
It's wicked easy, I just made some marks on the square of rubber, drew lines with my pencil and carved. I did dig them a bit deeper than I needed but that was in part due to the rubber...it kept wanting to pull the blade deeper as I pushed it along the line. I tried to straighten them up as best I could but you can see there are some pretty wiggly lines. Not bad for a first try though.
This stamp was carved using some pretty yellow rubber blanks that I bought on amazon. Actually it was a set of 5 of these squares - about 2" square. I must say I'm not real impressed with these pieces of rubber. They are a bit difficult to cut (as opposed to the Speedball pink rubber) and they are not flat. I found that little bit out when I went to stamp the image above. It's higher in the center than it is the edges so to get the images above I had to rock the stamp back and forth to get a full impression.
All in all, this was a fun start to Carve December 2017. Are you carving?